Month: June 2013

The first QRcode in the world to be printed out on the ground Portuguese pavement

For the past ten years, there have been many attempts to embed information in the physical architecture of cities. This new media trend is part of a whole phenomenon conceptualized by media scholars as “net locality”; the concept is illustrated by the idea of a small town, once physical isolated from the rest of the world, becomes potentially cosmopolitan because of the information embedded into its streets.

Net locality projects have different goals; nevertheless, many of them share the common objective of augmenting the knowledge of passersby about their surroundings or about a specific location through a set of technologies: GPS-enabled phones, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC) and so on.

One technology that has been used to physically attach information to physical places is QRcodes. Some examples are in New York City, at the Central Park or at the buildings with city permits, an initiative approved by the City Council. The latter has been heavily criticized; while some people present the project as an innovative method to inform citizens and promote government transparency, others argue that the QRcodes will not be set in the best place and will be hard to costumers to scan them. As I wrote in a previous blog post, the issue of making the QRcodes visible and easy to scan is a concern also of Monmouthpedia.

What is interesting to highlight about these projects is the implied discourse of innovation that is practiced in the field of locative media, either by researchers, popular press or innovators. In other words, being a pioneer seems to be the most important thing of the deployment of a technology. Concerns with adoption seem to be taken for granted. For instance, when I look at the discourse of some people presenting the creative implementation of QRcodes, I see that a sort of flag of “ the first one” being waived: the world’s first location-based Wikipedia city; the first QRcode in the world to be printed out on the ground Portuguese pavement; the first government agency in the United States to deploy QRcodes in the US.

While this flag is waived, much criticism is left behind. Thus, net locality projects are launched with great expectations. They would foster serendipity, increasing people’s sense of their surroundings; provide access for digital heritage, participation and citizen engagement and increase tourism.

However, despite the significance of these projects we have noticed a lack of conceptualization and a critical theoretical guidance of what is location-based information applied to physical places in urban places. Are people interested in reading long articles while on the go? If these projects are designed for tourists, is there free Wi-Fi network available? The latter is critical to a project like that to be successful. After all, 3G/4G roaming service for tourists abroad is still very expensive to afford. In this sense, if these QRcodes implementation in cities aim at reaching tourists and the city does not provide free Wi-Fi access they are missing the point.

The final questions I raise about these projects are: what is the best physical place to attach information? Which content should be tagged to places? What is the role of context and local knowledge when information is attached to places? What happens when passersby have access to information on a façade of a building?

Monmouth is a historical town in Wales, within 2 miles (3.2 KM) of the border with England. Last year, in August, I decided to visit the town to understand the deployment of QRcodes in buildings with Wikipedia articles. Since I was studying locative media and were looking for potential case studies, I thought that would be worth seeing. I was in Lisbon, Portugal, for one month. So I flew from there to the international airport of Bristol, in the evening of July 31 2012. From Bristol, I got a train to Newport, Wales. I spent the night there and in the morning I took a bus to Monmouth. On the bus, I noticed two young people had headphones on and were using smartphones. One of them was using a Samsung phone. However,throughout the whole journey, I noticed then that the Chinese brand HTC is very well used in the United Kingdom. It seems like iPhones over there are not so pervasive as here in the United States.

After one hour on the bus, I arrived in Monmouth. I was eager to see the QRcodes, but I walked through downtown and went to the hotel, where I had a reservation. As soon as I checked in the hotel I introduced myself to the receptionist, a young woman in her twenties. I told her why I went to Monmouth by explaining that I was doing research about Monmouthpedia. Politely enough, she paid attention to what I was saying, but she had no idea what I was talking about. She was not aware of the deployment of QRcodes to access Wikipedia articles in historical buildings and commercial stores in the town, including the hotel where she was working. Having felt a bit embarrassed, she explained that she was not a local and had moved to the town recently.

My second interaction was with a sales assistant, in a store, also a young lady. Unlike the receptionist, she had heard of “Monmouthpedia”, but she never had tried it, because she did not have a smartphone to scan the codes. It is worth noting that this store is located in the main road of the downtown, where there are Cafés, restaurants and all sort of stores. On this street, the majority of stores had blue stickers of small QRcodes on their show windows. However, many of them were not visible. I talked to two employees of a drug store with a blue sticker of QRcodes. While one had no idea about the codes, the other had tried it and could see a value on it.

Drawing on my one week of observations and informal conversations I had with residents and tourists in Monmouth, I concluded that many people did not have a smartphone there. Some locals did not have even a mobile phone. An older woman said to me: “the mobile phone is the most unsocial thing I have seen…” Another woman said she was not interested in QRcodes because she was a local and knew everything about local places.

On the other hand, I also concluded that kids are more willing to use these codes. According to a sales assistant of a shoes store, usually kids scan more the codes than adults. She also saw a group of Japanese tourists using the codes to learn more about places.

Types of QR Codes in Monmouth

I saw four types of manufactured QRcodes in Monmouth: 1) a glass sticker which is made of an adhesive blue plastic and is commonly stuck onto stores show windows, 2) a rectangular tile with a size of 12 cm X 22 cm, usually stuck on historical/listed buildings, 3) a printed out on paper, used in the ShireHall, a listed building and also center of tourist information, and 4) QRcodes stuck on books, with additional information about the author.

Drawbacks

1) Access: Many people do not own smartphones being unable to scan the codes. Moreover, free WiFi is not available. It is not very likely that tourists will use the roaming service just to scan a QRcode.

2) Visibility: Some QRcodes are not easily visible. I had to look carefully for many of them.

3) Context: Some of the QRcodes available are not created to convey context. They function simply as key words, offering definitions that assume most people already know. For instance, a bookstore has a QRcode with the words: “Book”, “Literature”, “Biography”, and “Fiction”. Another example is a drug store that has codes that link to “perfume”, “ prescription”, “personal care”, “superdrug”.

4) What should be tagged? Only local places? I noticed that international restaurants (e.g: Chinese, Indian) are not tagged with QRcodes, excepting an Italian Restaurant in the main street of downtown, I mentioned before.

What is a smartphone to a kid? What is the first thought that comes to a kids mind when he thinks of a smartphone? What role does “location” play in his thinking process? How can it be used for education? Last Friday, June 14th, during the celebration of the new grantRiver City Youth Foundation (RCYF) received from the City of Austin’s government, I was struck by a 10 years-old Latino kid who gave me a genuine and spontaneous answer to the question: “Tell me three things you can do with a smartphone?” In Spanish, I had posed the question to the entire audience who were residents of DoveSprings, a low-income neighborhood in the southeast of Austin.

Oné Musel-Gilley, the PR of RCYF and founder of the program Techcomunidad, was asking the kids educational questions and presenting them with awards. Many children were standing in front of me and could not wait to hear my question. Thus, the boy was pretty excited to answer the question in order to get the award. Moreover, he needed to be competitive; after all there were others kids standing besides him, all of them eager to earn a gift as well. After thinking for a few seconds, the kid said the answer at full blast: 1) Look for places, 2) Talk to friends, and 3) Take pictures. His response could not be more complete. He was happy as he was rewarded!

There were three observations that I made about his response. First, his response conveys the potential of the smartphone as a tool to enhance people’s sense of physical places, the development of location-based applications, and the potential of place-based storytelling. Second, it shows the social aspects of the applications. It is interesting to note that he used the verb “to talk” instead of “to call”, extending the meaning of a smartphone to digital social networks. And third, the “take pictures” response also illustrates the smartphone as a practical tool.

Another interpretation of his answer is the fact that smartphones are highly associated with navigation. I was wondering to which degree of familiarity the kid had with smartphones. I then noticed that his mother had a smartphone. In the beginning of the celebration, when just a few people were there, she was using it. After a while she put the phone down on the table. It is very likely that this kid’s family use the smartphone for navigation purposes.

I wonder if the 10 years-old boy had the opportunity to use any digital mobile device in his school. I also wonder how his parents would respond to the same question. Certainly, there is an entire new world that is open to researchers who are interested in learning how the next generations will use digital mobile devices in the long term. During my fieldwork, I will observe some of these generation dynamics and I will share some of these thoughts on my research “journey”, here on this blog.

My research combines three different fields: locative media, citizen journalism, and memory studies. Building on the principles of these areas of research, I am proposing a new concept called “locative citizen journalism”, which briefly means the creation of place-based stories by local residents about their locality with a very strong historical, life stories, and memory aspects.

I am currently conducting fieldwork in Austin, Texas. For the purpose of my dissertation, I am taking the approach of “Ethnographic Action Research” (EAR). It merges methods of ethnography with action research, which aims at engaging different stakeholders in the research development.

Following this premise, my professor Dr. Joseph Straubhaar and I have partnered so far with two organizations, in Austin, where I will run workshops with local residents about the creation of local content and upload this content to a website and mobile application called HistoryPin (see more information below). During the process, I will observe, take field notes, interview participants and participate with them in the creation of their stories. To ensure the integrity of participants, I have received approval by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of The University of Texas at Austin.

Our two partners are River City Youth Foundation (RCYF) and Latinitas. The first is a non-profit organization located at Dove Springs, a very low-income area in the southeast of the city. This neighborhood is Austin’s largest populated youth community, where one of every two households does not have technology access, and the residents are mainly Latinos and African-Americans. Since many of the residents are Spanish speakers only, the organization has a bilingual workforce. In order to bridge this digital gap, Oné Musel-Gilley – the public relations of RCYF – founded the program/event TechComunidad, which is focused on the technology training of parents/adults to capacitate them to guide theirs kid’s education. Sponsored by Dell, TechComunidad granted many families with a Dell tablet in 2012. Those parents will be the participants of the workshops I will run about mobile/locative media.

Our second partner, Latinitas, is also a non-profit organization founded in 2002, with the aim of teaching young latinas girls media and technology. The organization publishes a magazine and also hosts media enrichment programs.Latinitas will hold summer camps in June and July. My workshop will be integrated in the session “Media is Power” (June 24-28).

The overall goal of these workshops is to help local residents understand their local environment in a holistic way, increase their sense of place (mainly about their neighborhood) in order to raise awareness of their reality in the city as whole. However, it is important to highlight that the workshops will function as focus groups. Therefore, rather than only teaching, my goal is also to learn from the community what matters to be reported, to be remembered in order to change the present and make their present more meaningful. I also plan to observe how they react towards location-based technology in general.

HistoryPin

HistoryPin is a great tool for this study, because it is a social mapping website and also a mobile application – available for ISO and Android operating systems – that allows users to pin images, video, and audio clips to Google Maps. Users can include a story about each image and other meta data. It also enables the user to create a channel, where you can manage and customize your content and page. The versatility of HistoryPin facilitates the work and uploading of contents, either on the fly or working at desktop computer. With the mobile app, users can overlay images with Google street view, take walking tours, and see collections. Users are also able to see on the map stories that are near to them, through location disclosure.

Before choosing HistoryPin for this study, I looked at several other applications, such as crowdmap/Ushahidi, local wiki, and Broadcaster. I also talked to the journalism professors Amy Weiss Schmitz – at San Diego University- and Cindy Royal, – then at Texas State University – who have tried some of these apps with their students. After doing the research, I concluded that HistoryPin would be the easiest platform for participants. It has a user-friendly interface, a very little learning curve for pinning.

Some researchers consider the low awareness of HistoryPin a drawback. However, for the purpose of this study, this is a matter of fact. Many past quantitative studies about location-based services have showed that users do not see a benefit in disclosing location and that those services are not reaching the tipping point. Building on that, I also aim to observe how early adopters understand the value of those apps.

HistoryPin is designed by non-profit “We are what we do” in partnership with Google. According to Kevin C. Miller (2013), the platform has about 232, 293 items pinned and about 400,000 visitors per month. It has also 45,000 contributors and 1, 100 institutions.

The development of a consistent research proposal is key for the success of any PhD thesis. That is the process of choosing a topic, doing an exhaustive literature review, identifying gaps in the field, raising research questions, and finally selecting the right method to answer these questions. Anne Galloway – in the introduction of her dissertation entitled “A Brief History of Locative Media and Urban Computing” (2008) – says that a research proposal is a “warm-up stage”.

Based on my experience, I would say that it is through this process that a student becomes knowledgeable and confident about the chosen research topic. Thus, it is advisable to extend this warm-up stage for a good length of time. It is important to have feedback from different professors and colleagues from different universities, not only from supervisors, and to take courses in different fields in order to have a solid and extensive background.

Within eight months, I had to design three different research proposals, all in the scope of locative media. It happened because the first one was refuted by one of my advisors, the second was disrupted because one of the case studies – the hyperlocal service EveryBlock – was shut down, and finally the third was the one, which was presented to and accepted by the research committee. Rather than describing those proposals, I want to highlight what I learned from them and from the experience of the feeling of failure.

First of all, my experience illustrates the difficulties of doing research in the field of digital media, a world where everything is very liquid and transitory. On the one hand, this is positive because it facilitates one to be innovative. On the other hand, one needs to juggle with uncertainty. That is why there is a turn to the construction of prototypes and experiments in social sciences. It seems that there is a call to think in more suitable research methods to study digital media. By doing the literature review, I learned that the research in locative media, for example, is quite interdisciplinary, nevertheless, the empirical research is often undertaken by designers, architects, computer scientists or interdisciplinary groups.

Unlike those researchers, media scholars undertake qualitative studies such as cases studies, interviews, and ethnography. Therefore, the question is: Given that these digital services have a short lifespan, how can one come up with a good case study that keeps its relevance over time? In one of the conversations I had with a professor and expert in the scholarship of locative media, she posed me the following concern: “You have to think that your dissertation has to have an impact int the academic community when you finish it in two years. What if “Foursquare” (a potential case study for me) fades into inexistence in two years?” That was also the concern of my professor who refuted my first proposal. I had proposed to study two cases: the growing Monmouthpedia and the inexistent Manor. Both of them were cities, in which buildings had QRcodes with articles about their places where they were stuck, a phenomenon named “physical geotagging” (see my blog post “Geotagging of Physical Places“). The core of my proposal was to understand why many of locative media projects fails and why they are not reaching the tipping point.

By discussing this concern with a friend of mine, who is a professor in the engineering school, I learned with him that one possible response for this question is to invest in “fundamental research”, without any direct practical application or use in view. After all, there are blasts of new fields of research, that are absorbed by distinct other areas, which demands understanding from the start. For example, locative media ranges from new media arts to journalism.

Over time, I concluded that the three proposals were the bedrock of my dissertation, since they altogether were the source from where my current project germinated. Only now I recognize that, but I have to confess that for a long time I felt sorry for myself for having my first proposal refuted. It is obvious that was not an easy process, neither emotionally nor intellectually. However, I grew mature and stronger to come up with better ideas.

Tips for people who are working on a research proposal:

1) In the beginning, you do not even know the terminologies of your field of research. Type all combinations of words and terms that come to your mind in the library databases search.

2) Once you have read many papers and books, and identified the experts in your field, try to reach them out. The best strategy is to attend conferences focused in your area of research, even if you do not have a paper to present. The experts will be there and you will be able to talk to them over lunch or coffee breaks. Don’t be shy!

3) Make a list of research questions and keep it in your purse or pocket. I know that sounds nerdy, but that is a good way to develop them into better ideas.